Property and...

[pegkerr]

I keep thinking about Lincoln’s second inaugural address, in which he said:

”...Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

I’m grieving about the property damage, yes—-the terrible loss of Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery bookstore particularly hurts—but people are more important than property, and the protests over the death of George Floyd are righteous. Justice for George Floyd trumps everything. Echoing Lincoln: could it be that all the burnt buildings, all the destroyed buildings are divine justice, a mere drop in the bucket of expiation for the robbing of black Americans of their economic justice? The stolen wages of slavery and sharecropping, the redlining and higher mortgage rates for would be black homeowners? The denial of GI penefits, jobs and pensions?

A comment on Twitter last night: don’t expect people who are shut out of the benefits of the social contract to adhere to it.

(I’m still glad that the neighborhood watch saved the Nokomis Library last night from the knuckleheads who tried to burn it down.)

Edited to add: And I wholeheartedly append to this post naomikritzer's comments below.

Comments

[stinaleigh]

A friend was visiting (safely) when I learned of the loss of Uncle Hugo's/Uncle Edgar's. I went to my book shelves and pulled about 5 books immediately that I could immediately show her as ones I had purchased there.

So sad. But, yes, building up the people is more important.

[aome]

I agree with people over property but I do NOT agree with the senseless destruction. What on earth did your two precious bookstore owners do wrong? Nothing. What purpose is there in damaging them, looting them, destroying them? How does that serve justice for George Floyd?

MLKjr believed in making demands through peace. How about peacefully blockading? How about demanding fairer wages for POC employees? How about demanding better educational opportunities for POC so they can GET better wages? How about continuing to impress the point that cops need better race training. How about CREATING better race training for cops (and, honestly, everyone), and presenting it everywhere? How about going back to getting stores reopened so people in service jobs can go back to work and afford their food, gas, electric bills, etc?

Damaged stores won't reopen. Those employees will not get their food money. People above property - but senseless destruction solves nothing and only makes the protesters look bad. Protest with purpose.

[pegkerr]

And what has protesting peacefully done for the protestors? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. You may not be aware, but here in Minneapolis, we had a black man named Philando Castile, a beloved staff member who worked at a local school, shot on camera five years ago. The office who killed him ON CAMERA was acquitted. Why should any of those people believe the city when they say about the George Floyd case, "Trust us, this time justice will be served." The looters are saying, "You don't pay attention to us? You choose property over lives? Fine: maybe you'll pay attention to this." It actually does make logical and to some extent tactical sense.

The people who were peacefully protesting at the site where George Floyd died were teargassed and arrested last night. What good did it do them to peacefully protest? To those with hardened hearts, protesters who are "virtuous" "look bad" simply by asking for justice. As I said, why should they adhere to the social contract if it doesn't serve them?

Do some googling about the morality/ethics of looting. I did, and it has shifted my thinking.

[aome]

Ok, but what are the rioters/looters hoping to achieve, with their "pay attention to THIS." What "attention" will make them stand down? An apology is clearly NOT good enough, nor should it be. What gesture from white people, or cops, or even specifically Minneapolis cops, will convince the looters that they've been heard? Is there a specific goal? Because I haven't heard of one. The cop that wrongly killed George has already been charged with murder. Trials take ages - are they planning on looting for months to ensure he's convicted?

[julian]

It's more than just the one guy, though. His co-workers who stood around and/or helped have been fired, but they haven't been charged with anything as of yet.

That's a detail, though.

Overall, there's a lot of voices inside this movement. A lot of them are new.

I don't know what their ultimate goal is. It may be they don't, currently, have one, other than to say the current system is not on their side. (Which it is not.)

And they may be saying, at heart, that it needs changing, in massive, sweeping ways.

I have, frankly, been wary of folks saying we need to upset the apple cart-- there's been a lot of them, from both sides of the aisle. I've always felt that it would lead to reactionary responses. But this may be happening at the moment anyway, and we may need to buckle in and ride it out.

Personally, I'm more in favor of things like what this guy talks about-- changes in how we do policing, and changes in how we fund it. https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1180655701271732224

But I don't know how that will happen.

[cyllan]

There may not be a specific goal. But, the protests -- and I include the violent clashes with police in that category -- have had an impact.

I work for a Very Large Tech Company headed by a CEO who is remarkably left-leaning for an exec. And today, because of what happened over the four days, the C-suite called an all-hands call to discuss racial justice, equity and inclusion. They've centered the conversation around black voices, pledged money to BLM, and have laid out concrete steps to (continue to) try and lift up black employees and reduce bias in hiring, promotions, etc. And yeah, we were taking steps in that direction, but explicitly laying it out like this? Would not have happened last Monday.

Now, I'm not in Minneapolis; y'all have got some other weird stuff going on that I can't speak to. But Black Americans showing that they have finally hit their limits of nice? That has an impact.

[ndrosen]

I appreciate what Naomi Kritzer wrote below. As to the present question, looting, aside from being unjust to business owners who never told any police officer to asphyxiate an alleged minor criminal, is otherwise destructive. Granted, I can see people being quite rightly infuriated when yet another black man is murdered by police, and peaceful protests are ignored, but speaking of the ethics of looting, what are the consequences likely to be?

If a store in a minority neighborhood is looted and burned, would you rebuild it? The answer may be no, in which case the people of that neighborhood will then have to go an extra distance, and maybe pay bus or cab fare, to buy what they need. Or if the store is rebuilt, the merchandise may be sold at a risk premium, to cover the danger of periodic riots destroying the place, and the cost of extra security measures. The looters, whatever their motives, are in effect imposing a tax on the poor.

Secondly, when people see rioting and looting on TV, and feel threatened, how are many of them going to react? They’re likely to support hiring more cops, and cracking down on the violent hoodlums — which sometimes involves cracking down on those guilty of trivial offenses, or of walking on the sidewalk while black.

Somehow, we need to make crime reasonably dangerous for real criminals, and to include grossly abusive policemen in the real criminals whose behavior will not be tolerated. We need to break the feedback of crime, oppressive policing, and periodic rioting.

[cynthia1960]

Absolutely right. We're also seeing White people who have benefited from the unequal social contract violently endanger Black communities. Selfish evil bastards.

[dreamshark]

"Echoing Lincoln: could it be that all the burnt buildings, all the destroyed buildings are divine justice, a mere drop in the bucket of expiation for the robbing of black Americans of their economic justice? The stolen wages of slavery and sharecropping, the redlining and higher mortgage rates for would be black homeowners? The denial of GI penefits, jobs and pensions?"

Sounds plausible in the abstract until you realize that many of the businesses destroyed were the only sources of food, medicine, and other services available to the poor and disenfranchised people in that neighborhood. Remember the outrage over lack of COVID testing services available to people in poor neighborhoods? I'm pretty sure that I heard that at least one of the vandalized CVS sites had been planning to roll out COVID testing within the coming week. That's not going to happen now.

The local authorities have been trying to draw a clear distinction between "protesters" and "rioters." Not everyone is buying it, but I think it is the right distinction to make. Some people are out there trying to make a statement. Others are clearly just there to destroy things or to grab stuff for themselves. There are border cases. Burning the police precinct station, while not something I actually condone, at least makes a clear political statement. There is no ideological justification for looting a pharmacy or liquor store.

[pru]

I agree with you. destruction of property is heartbreaking to watch but it's more heartbreaking that black people are just senselessly killed by various factors, including centuries of inherent racism and inequity and financial/zoning and yes, also the police.

[naomikritzer]

Here's the thing I've been struggling to articulate (struggling particularly because identifying who's doing what with specificity is extremely difficult):

I liked Saladin Ahmed's take, "I know nuance is hard right now but we really need to distinguish between white pseudo-anarchist kids' myopic armageddonism and Black people's frankly undeniable moral right to smash whatever they hell they want to."

That first night, plenty of the looting was local, and it showed. Target got looted. (I don't think this was that much because of anger at Target, I think it was more just pragmatically that it's where the stuff was. Out-of-towners were claiming that Target had "refused to sell milk to protesters." That was bullshit. Target just closed the store early to let their employees go home before the protest really got going.) There was looting of some specific stuff that always gets looted if there's looting -- pharmacies, liquor store, people tried to break into an ATM, and the local businesses were mostly, though not entirely, left alone.

There was also some seriously opportunistic looting already -- Uptown. That was clearly not people drifting over from the protests. That was opportunistic burglary while the police department wasn't responding to calls.

The following night, the precinct burned. That may have been aided and abetted by "outsiders" of one kind or another, but let's be very clear about this: that absolutely had the enthusiastic support of the crowd and probably most Minneapolis residents who weren't there. My very law-abiding husband's comment was, "one down, four to go."

But then there was the explosion of fires that were NOT avoiding local businesses and community centers and that in fact targeted Black-owned businesses, Black neighborhoods, and the centers of Black community. And this is why I profoundly disagree with "property damage isn't violence." When groups of white people -- whether they are white supremacists or some sort of "burn it to the ground and start over"/"let's get this revolution started" leftists -- are deliberately targeting Black communities for arson, that is ABSOLUTELY VIOLENT. Uncle Hugo's is not a Black-owned business but it stood in the heart of a mostly Black neighborhood, surrounded by Black-owned businesses that were painstakingly built up from a wasteland of boarded-over buildings over decades of work. Destroying decades of work by Black and immigrant people to revitalize a neighborhood without gentrifying it? HELL FUCKING YES THAT IS VIOLENT. And I absolutely do not believe this was the neighborhood "destroying itself," because when it was the rage of Minneapolis protesters, it looked entirely different. (Also, plenty of eyewitnesses reported that the group(s) that set fire to the Uncle Hugo's block were well-equipped carloads of white people, same as the other fires that night.)

[pegkerr]

Agree 1000%.

[julian]

Yah. There are a lot of things *like that* happening similarly in other places, as well, and I absolutely do not want one group's rage to be suborned by another's opportunism. But I don't know what to do about it. (Other than for people to protect each other as best they can.)

[pegkerr]

And here is part of what is making me so angry, by the way, on top of the wanton destruction: the jerks who are doing this, whether they have come in from out of town to burn things up (or not) want to blur the lines as much as possible to confuse us. They want us pissed-off and stressed and sleep-deprived and angry and fighting amongst ourselves as we try to figure out what to do as our world is being destroyed.

I am angry because my fierce loyalty for my city is playing right into their hands; my love has become a weapon to be used against me. I'm furious because it's working, that they're using what's good in me to serve their atrocious aims.